The World Championships start in Rome tomorrow and I couldn’t be more excited. It is by far the biggest spectacle on the 2022 beach volleyball calendar. There are 96 teams playing 206 matches on four courts over 10 days. And at the end of all that, two teams will be crowned champions of the world! It doesn’t get any bigger than that, but it also creates an huge challenge for one blogger to follow in his spare time.
To provide more depth, the Beach Volley Blog is going to take a different approach. I’ll focus all my attention on two teams to follow throughout the tournament. For the next 10 days we are going to follow Canadian men, Dan Dearing & Sam Schachter and Cuban women, Leila Martinez & Lidianny Echeverria as they battle at the World Championships. We’ll also meet all of the teams they encounter along the way. There promises to be plenty of drama with this approach and the World Championship drama has already begun in Dearing and Schachter’s pool.
Why Canada and Cuba?
Neither of these teams are considered favorites to win the World Championships, but they’ve got the talent to knockout any of the teams that are. Three of the players, Sam, Leila and Lidianny, have played in the Olympics. Sam is even a World Champion at the U21 level from 2010. Both teams are in Rome because they won the NORCECA World Championships qualification tournament last April, but they are not merely continental quota fill ins. These teams can ball and have what it takes to still be playing on June 19th.
We’ll dig into the Cuban and Canadian back stories more over the coming days, but for any of you Podcast listeners, this episode of Sandcast, is a great place to get to know Sam and Dan (after you finish this article, of course).
The Cuban women don’t get many chances to compete far from home, but when they do, they turn heads. Last year they got my attention at the Cancun three event hub where they played with different partners. Leila & Mailen Deliz beat Mariafe Artacho & Taliqua Clancy in the first Cancun tournament and Lidianny & Yanisleidis Sanchez finished 5th in the final Cancun event. They made it to Tokyo via the Continental Cup and became partners just in time to play together at the Olympics. After breaking pool in Tokyo, they eliminated Raisa Schoon & Katja Stam in the first knockout round. As you can see, they cause the biggest teams…
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